Gamification

Our virtual German city project, #pfefferhausen, will continue to grow in the 2016/17 academic year. I will write more extensively about the growing project in the coming months, and a couple of conference presentations are also in the works. At this point I wanted to give a brief update about our status and new developments.

We expanded and now our 2nd semester students are already becoming virtual citizens and creators.

In the fall, 3rd semester students will participate again. This time, they will receive their tasks and missions through a gamification engine built into our site so that students have more agency and can track their process. More on that soon.

I am moving the site to our own server to have more control.

I will implement a game-based task/mission/quest system that allows students to level up and watch their progress. In-game units will include experience and Euros. Most missions will reflect real-world tasks, like recording a 5-minute conversation or planning or attending an event.

In general, our virtual city will go and students will have more agency in their own learning.

More to come soon, I look forward to reporting back in the fall about this exciting project.